Rarely to get exciting reading articles in academic journals (whether that says bad thing about me or the journals I leave to you), but this is exciting: “The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A Randomized Controlled Trial Of Police Patrol Effectiveness In Violent Crime Hotspots.” It’s in the current issue of Criminology (like most academic journals, unavailable to the general public).…
Tag: for academics
In Defense of Tenure
Three cheers for actor Matt Damon! You know, Matt and I have a lot in common. Both our mothers are retired school teachers. Both of us went to school in Cambridge, Mass. And both of us are devilishly good looking! But seriously, both of us know that the answer to bad teaching is not job insecurity. You go, Matt! While…
Research Methods
“Come now, E.B.! It’s time for us to venture out and continue our study of early 21st century society…” “Aww. Can’t we just stay in and do our research online?” “I’m afraid not… to truly understand a people and culture, we must walk among them! Document their daily routines and observe them in direct face to fact interactions.” Fine advice…
In Defense of Introversion
In the New York Timestoday, there’s an article extolling the benefits of introversion. I love reading pieces like this, which make it clear that introversion is a personality trait and not a medical problem that needs to be “cured” or treated with drugs. My understanding of introversion began after I realized that being introverted is not the same as being…
Irrelevant academic research
By journalist Mara Hvistendahl in the Chronicle of Higher Education: I turned to academic papers because I wanted to do more than throw back a fleeting image. But scholars are haunted by their own demons. I recently polled a few journalist friends, asking them how often they rely on academic research, and how useful and accessible they find that information.…
Poverty doesn’t equal crime
James Q. Wilson writes some good stuff on crime in the Wall Street Journal. But this worries me: Culture creates a problem for social scientists like me, however. We do not know how to study it in a way that produces hard numbers and testable theories. Culture is the realm of novelists and biographers, not of data-driven social scientists. But…
“This damn job could be work”
No doubt you, like most others, think the professorial life is all glamor, fame, leisure, wine, and women. That’s just what I wantyou to think with my frequent vacations and the fact there’s a good chance I might still be in my bathrobe at 3pm (working at home, mind you). Such perks do have their advantages. Nevertheless, there’s nothing more…
Grad School Advice
I always feel like who am I to talk about grad school? I didn’t follow any of the standards Rules to Successful Completion. I liked school, but I wasn’t hanging around the department and I took nine years to finish. I might have been the only Harvard sociology student history to fail the “oral exam” (go ahead and snicker, I…
Mistaken-Identity Police Shootings in Black and White
The death of a Nassau County police officer got me thinking about cases of police officers shot by other cops. There’s the belief out there that black officers are much more at risk of being mistaken for suspects than are white officers. It’s also been said (by me?) that such accidental mistaken-identity shootings almost never happen to white officers. Officer…
1919 Map of Ethnics and Other Seditious Activities in New York City
You know how “kids these days” think everything in the world is online and can be found with Google? Well, find this: John B. Trevor’s 1919 Ethnic Map of New York City. I’ve wanted this map ever since I saw it. Trevor, non-elected but politically powerful, was worried that immigrants (Jews in particular) were going to take over America. As…